Chapter 1: What recent developments have raised concerns among election officials?
Two recent elections-related developments are playing out today that have some election officials concerned. The first relates to the FBI seizure of election documents in Georgia, a state whose election President Donald Trump continues to falsely claim he won in 2020. The second involves recent public comments made by the president that elections should be nationalized in 15 states.
Both of these actions may be illegal as the Trump administration crossed a line. Hello and welcome to USA Today's The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Friday, February 6th, 2026.
Chapter 2: What happened during the FBI's raid of the Fulton County elections office?
Here to help me unpack this important and involving story is USA Today Justice Department correspondent, Asha Bakshi. Asha, thanks for hopping on.
sure thing happy to be here asia start us off please by telling us about the raid where was it and what happened this raid was at a very large election center in fulton county it's the fulton county election hub near atlanta it's a hub that actually i've been to a couple times i was covering the 2024 national elections down in georgia
It's a very important hub when it comes to vote tabulation and it stores a lot of voting records.
Chapter 3: What evidence is the FBI seeking in relation to the 2020 election?
And this is tied to much of Atlanta. Fulton County is the most populous county in Georgia. So it's a very important county for understanding what happens in the state as a whole. Joe Biden's win there in 2020 helped propel him to victory across the nation.
And the FBI conducted a raid here where it was authorized by a search warrant to seize physical ballots, to seize ballot images, and to see some records tied to vote counting, vote tabulation in Fulton County, all in relation to the 2020 election.
And has the FBI given a compelling reason for the raid? What did they say they were investigating?
The FBI has been pretty tight lipped when it comes to this investigation. When I reached out to them, they told me just that they were engaged in some sort of court authorized law enforcement activity.
Chapter 4: What legal challenges are being posed against the FBI's actions?
But the search warrant that they used to conduct this raid has been released. And that tells us something about what they are looking at. It cited two different criminal statutes. One has to do with maintaining voting records, that those records have to be maintained after a federal election for 22 months.
So it looks like part of what they're looking at is whether Fulton County did that after the 2020 election. And then the second one has to do with potential threats or coercion or fraud in relation to the voting process itself. So it looks like the FBI is looking into some sort of potential crime related to that.
Chapter 5: How did Trump's legal efforts relate to the Georgia election?
What specifically that involves, we don't know. The government would have submitted an affidavit in which they would have described specifically what the details really are of what they're looking at here. But that affidavit remains under seal. So we haven't really gotten a picture of the evidence that a magistrate judge looked at when she signed this warrant.
It is true that for a judge to sign a warrant, the judge has to find that there's something called probable cause. That means basically just looking at the evidence that the government presented, a judge is saying that there's a reasonable belief that a crime may have occurred.
It's not the type of process that you have when you have two sides often in criminal cases, you know, making their cases. But it does say that the judge saw something that she thought gave the government license to seize these records.
Perhaps the biggest question looming over the FBI's action is one of legality. What are the experts saying here?
It's a bit of a challenge for legal experts right now because there's so much we don't know. Because the affidavit hasn't been released, we don't actually know what evidence the government presented to a judge. So it's hard for outside legal experts to be able to weigh in too much on what happened here.
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Chapter 6: What is the significance of the statute of limitations in this case?
But we do know that Fulton County has filed a motion challenging the legality of the search warrant and basically asking a court to make the government return all the records it seized and to halt the government from searching the records, doing anything with those records until a judge has decided whether Fulton County should win on its motion.
So we know a legal challenge is going on here that's challenging the lawfulness, but even that is under seal. So unfortunately, right now, there's a cloud of mystery still shrouding what's happening here.
Following the 2020 election, Trump and his allies launched dozens of lawsuits across the country, all seeking evidence of voter fraud or rigged elections. Did this include Georgia? And is there any new evidence that might come to light?
It did include Georgia. It's important to note, you know, Trump and his allies filed about 60 lawsuits around the country. Nothing from that was successful in showing that there was any type of widespread voter fraud that would have overturned the results of the 2020 election. They did file lawsuits in Georgia that did not work. Rudy Giuliani, who was a very close ally of President Trump,
alleged that particular election workers in Georgia had engaged in some sort of fraud or rigging. Those election workers later sued him in court for defamation, and they won an enormous judgment, more than $100 million for defamation, which basically means you have to show that what the person said was false and that they said it in some sort of reckless fashion.
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Chapter 7: What implications could the raid have on future elections?
And then Georgia also brought charges against President Trump essentially arguing that he unlawfully tried to overturn election results in that state as part of his efforts to overturn election results across the country. That case never went to trial for the president. It has now been dropped. There's a little bit of a backstory around that involving the lead prosecutor.
But another reason it was dropped has to do with the fact that Donald Trump won the 2024 election. And a prosecutor who took over this case decided that that would push this case out by many years. And that was a reason to just drop the charges entirely. But Trump did try very much to overturn the Georgia election results. That state only had 16 presidential electoral votes.
That wouldn't have been nearly enough for Donald Trump to have reversed the overall national election results because Joe Biden won that election by winning several swing states, not just Georgia.
It's been over five years now since the 2020 election. Does the statute of limitations apply?
Chapter 8: What statements has Trump made regarding nationalizing elections?
This is a bit of a tricky question. I've spent some time looking into it. Basically, for most federal statutes, you have a five-year statute of limitations. What that refers to is for a lot of different crimes, prosecutors only have a limited window in which they can bring those charges. And as you pointed out, the election was more than five years ago.
But if you look at the search warrant and the particular crimes that it looks like the FBI is, potential crimes that the FBI is looking into, one of them, that one about preserving records for 22 months, That would mean that someone could have hypothetically committed a crime by failing to preserve records anytime up to at least a significant part of 2022.
And then if you apply the five-year statute of limitations from then, that means that the federal government could have until 2027. to bring charges for that kind of hypothetical crime.
When it comes to the separate criminal statute that was cited in the warrant, that has to do with this idea that someone may have engaged in threats or coercion or fraud related to the voting process or vote counting process in the 2020 election. That's where it seems to get a bit more complicated about how the government can be saying that
um the statute of limitations hasn't closed for those charges but just hypothetically speaking i don't want to say i know what's going on here because there is a lot of mystery still but hypothetically speaking it could be the case that the federal government is looking into something someone did after that election that relates to that type of charge you know for example you can engage in a in a conspiracy
to violate a federal statute. And you can do actions in furtherance of a conspiracy even later on, like destroying evidence or lying to federal investigators. Again, I'm just throwing some thoughts out here about how the government could be saying that it still has time to bring that type of charge.
But the truth is, until we get some more details about what evidence they're looking at and what they're even considering as a potential crime, It's hard to know how the government would still be able to bring charges, but maybe they have a theory for that.
Some in the media have suggested that this raid is now evidence that the White House is now directly running the FBI. Aisha, is there any precedent for this?
Well, in terms of recent precedent, a lot of this activity kind of falls out of what we are used to.
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